September 2009
57 posts
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EU Seeks to Turn Down MP3 Music Player Volumes →
5-10 percent of MP3 users risk permanent hearing loss if they listen to a music player at high volume for more than 1 hour per day, each week over at least 5 years. “It can take years for the hearing damage to show, and then it is simply too late,” she added.
(via nytimes)
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WatchA new Dirty Projectors song. That’s fine, but the vocal acrobatics between the three female singers are amazing. Is this the influence of computers, or could this arise without the existence of modern music technology? Does that question even really make sense?
(Recorded all casual in the Roots’ dressing room at Jimmy Fallon’s show. Stage version here.)
(via Pitchfork)
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WatchA cool little PD patch that uses a piezo and a jar of jumping beans to trigger some ambient, indeterminate music.
(via Create Digital Music)
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WatchSo you know how I posted that Dada video roundup inspired by Marie Osmond’s rendition of Hugo Ball’s Karawane?
Well, the professor I’m TAing for just sent me the ACTUAL VIDEO AND IT IS AMAZING. Not only does it include the whole of Karawane, but it also includes a basic introduction to Dada and sound poetry. I’m giving a guest lecture next week for MIT’s Digital...
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György Ligeti: Continuum (for player piano)
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György Ligeti: Continuum (for barrel organ)
A...
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Over at acousmata, there’s a post featuring...
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WatchThis is so great.
A video demonstration of how the push-up pianola is played, and then a little performance on it. Playing machines to play machines!
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WatchNick Seaver: Fergie Study #8 (video)
From the archives, this video is actually a class project I made last year.
The audio is a shortened version of one of my Pop Studies, which is made from a sample of the intro to “Glamorous” by Fergie. I took that sample, pitched it around and layered it, and then listened to what happened when I used Ableton Live’s time-stretching feature...
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RSS People, Dear Readers
Okay, I’m cutting myself off from metablogging posts for at least a month after this one, but I have a quick favor to ask of my RSS-based readers: I’d appreciate it if you could switch your feed address from the one that gave you this post to this one.
I’m running things through Feedburner now, which will give me a little more control over stuff than Tumblr does, with the added...
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Experimental Music is a Virus
A former student of mine picked up on the theme of “covers as musical indeterminacy” we discussed in my class on Indeterminacy this summer. We talked a lot about what different versions of a song need to have in common for them to be considered the “same song,” and what parts of a song are nonessential to its core “identity.”
Vicky took this to heart and...
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Things I Wrote or Made
I’ve added a new tag to some old posts on this blog, so people looking for content made by me (as opposed to the scads of youtube vids and links) can find it.
You can now filter posts by tag to see only things I wrote or made.
The categorization is pretty subjective, since both the things I make and the things I write are tied up to various degrees in things I did not make or write. For...
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Now this is fun
An in-browser, flash-based step sequencer, with multiple voices, drums, and volume/pan controls. Not to mention being embeddable! This is great.
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John Coltrane: “Giant Steps” +...
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WatchAsk and you shall receive, sort of. It doesn’t look like the footage (hurr) and sound are actually linked here, but the idea of using the human body’s conductive powers for radio reception is pretty neat!
(via Craft)
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Acousmatic listening is when you listen to a sound...
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More Electrified Instrument Names
(I think most, if not all, of these are keyboard instruments, as well.)
Telharmonium, Photona, Kaleidophon, Tuttivox, Synclavier, Multimonica, Emiriton, Variophone, Ariston, Terpsitone, Subharchord, Magnetophon, Mellotron, Staccatone, Clavilux, Novachord, Trautonium, Celluphone, Rhythmicon, Melodium, Composertron, Ondes Martenot, Magneton, Optigan, and Minifon
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John Oswald: “Z24”
On Plunderphonics
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Some Player Piano Names
Pianola, Pistonola, Orchestrelle, Amphion, Apollo, Angelus, Simplex, Humana, Aristo, Neola, Pianotist, Electrelle, Cecilian, Rex, Aeriola
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Me →
School starts up for me in a few days.
I’ve been trying to avoid too much metablogging on here, because I have found it to be a black hole that sucks up all my posting energy into posts about posting. But, since I’m about to get a whole lot busier, I wanted to make an effort to connect my coursework to the content on this blog.
That way, work on my thesis might count as work on the...
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Mozart Did It First
In 1787, Mozart wrote the measures and instructions for a musical composition dice game. The idea is to cut and paste pre-written measures of music together to create a Minuet. This site is an implementation of such a game. The music and table of rules for this game appear to have been published anonymously in 1787, and interestingly, the table of rules for this Minuet is identical to...
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